


Between One Heartbeat and the Next: The Liminal State of Clara Oswald [1/2]

by impossiblyeclecticduck (3ImpossiblyEclecticDuck6), Radiolaria



Series: Doctor Who (2005 - 2017) Meta [6]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Fanwork Research & Reference Guides, Gen, Meta, Other, Steven Moffat Era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-04
Updated: 2018-12-04
Packaged: 2019-09-07 05:20:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,947
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16847902
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/3ImpossiblyEclecticDuck6/pseuds/impossiblyeclecticduck, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Radiolaria/pseuds/Radiolaria
Summary: Meta inspired by meta written by a friend who has always hugely inspired and supported me, and her groundbreaking ideas on Clara Oswald.





	Between One Heartbeat and the Next: The Liminal State of Clara Oswald [1/2]

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Radiolaria](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Radiolaria/gifts).



> Possibly the first meta I wrote for Doctor Who, first published on my Tumblr blog on January 3, 2016. I remember how the writing process was; in one word, excruciating. I'm not as proud of it as I once was, I think it could be vastly improved, and its not the style I would use to write meta again. But I want to preserve it nonetheless, for the sake of history.
> 
> The content is practically the exact thing I first posted, and copy-pasted here.

[This is a discussion of [@onaperduamedee](http://tmblr.co/mg-VDmabjrgSm4noAbskbKg)‘s ideas about the symbolism associated with Clara Oswald in Series 7 and how they apply to her characterisation in Series 8 and 9. The original posts are here: [part 1](http://onaperduamedee.tumblr.com/post/79571132099/meta-clara-boxed-girl-part-1-intro-and-of), [part 2](http://onaperduamedee.tumblr.com/post/79590353258/meta-clara-boxed-girl-part-2), [part 3](http://onaperduamedee.tumblr.com/post/79590519934/meta-clara-boxed-girl-part-3).

To keep things tidy, I’m keeping this post limited to my thoughts on Series 8. I’ll make a post on Series 9 later.]

 

One of the aspects of Clara Oswald I find most fascinating is her liminality. Clara Oswald occupies an ambiguous, liminal territory within the story, and that itself eventually defines her. Fluidity and metamorphosis are the core elements as her character is constantly put through a process of unconsciousness, death, and transformation. Constantly in a state of transition, she weaves her own story with the fragments of her disjointed self until it forms an autonomous myth. The myth of Clara Oswald as it stands today is founded on her liminality.

‘Liminality’ usually refers to a ‘threshold period’, a state of transition between fixed spaces or structures, the liminal space being the ambiguous grey area in between, where the rules pertaining to the fixed structures often do not apply. It involves boundaries, spatial divides, and the breach of them into a more ambivalent space that is more dangerous as wells as richer in creative potential than the fixed points. Clara Oswald inhabits just such an ambivalent area in universe: adapting to the structures and rules of her daily life on Earth, adjusting her external image to fit the demands of her own concept of a storybook heroine, but unable to merge completely. Her marginal status becomes more and more prominent through her relationship with the Doctor and experiences of time travel.

[@onaperduamedee](http://tmblr.co/mg-VDmabjrgSm4noAbskbKg)‘s posts on this comes closest to exploring this in symbolic terms without actually using the term ‘liminality’. Her meta explores how, throughout Series 7, Clara Oswald is consistently confined to spaces, in ambiguous states of existence - conscious or unconscious, alive or dead, dreaming or awake. More importantly, she is often unaware of her condition. She always seks to transcend the boundaries of the space she is in currently. Containment, and the efforts to breach it, shapes her narrative. This desire to transcend her boundaries and identify herself as someone above her environs, necessarily puts her in situations where she is 'emptied’, forced into conditions of transition where her self is fragmented and she is left in a fluid, ambiguous level of existence between, or under, two or more fixed states. The metamorphosis allows her to reconstruct her identity, and it is the continuous will and effort to do so that remains the only constant. Through this metamorphosis, she becomes a 'coffin’ that can transit between different stages of existence and points in time and watch over life and death, and guide the Doctor across the darkness in between.

This trend of entrapment, containment, and the struggle to break out, continues into Series 8. In  _Deep Breath_ , Clara emerges from the physical, spatial containment of the crashed TARDIS, into Victorian London, a point in the past for her, and her identity and motivation is instantly put in an ambiguous position. The Doctor cannot initially identify her, and she cannot recognise him. Next, she is trapped in a restaurant which turns out to be a den of robots. The Half-face Man, notably, is a droid constructing a physical self out of components sourced from living organisms killed and dismantled - beneath the poorly built facade of skin, there is a hollow clockwork mechanism. The way to escape the attacking robots is to stop breathing for as long as required, simulating non-life. Clara fails to do so and loses consciousness. Later, the Doctor goes away in the TARDIS without her: she is left gazing at the square outline of the space she has lost.  In  _The Robot of Sherwood_ , Clara is dragged out of the spaceship window and falls into the moat below, very like in  _The Snowmen_ ; again, she loses consciousness.  In  _Time Heist_ , the telepathic alien connects with her mind while it is itself in forced hibernation within a glass box. In  _Mummy on the Orient Express_ , she is locked in with a sarcophagus that opens to reveal an interior filled with bubblewrap. She loses consciousness again, later in the episode, while inside a train that is quickly becoming a tomb for them. In  _Dark Water_ , for a considerable while, she acts out her grief while in a dream state, without realising it. She arrives at a place that contains corpses in glass boxes that appear to be skeletons but are actually Cybermen. She communicates with Danny, who is dead and whose mind is trapped inside another container. Later, she is trapped inside St. Paul’s Cathedral as the Cybermen emerge from their cases around her.

However, Clara’s situation between fixed and opposing states and spaces undergoes changes in Series 8. In Series 7, Clara has little to no control over her suspension between realms, and is often not even aware of it. In Series 8, she can adapt to, and manipulate her grey and unfixed conditions, effecting significant changes on her environment and other agents around her. In  _Into the Dalek_ , she is trapped within the body of a Dalek; the Dalek ultimately undergoes a radical change in identity and affiliation while Clara is still inside it. It is Clara who has the idea for this, & she aids the Doctor in bringing about the change. Clara actively initiates the metamorphosis here. In  _Listen_ , she unwillingly enters the TARDIS; when she attempts to check the events outside on the monitor, interference on screen thwarts her. She is effectively trapped again, unable to accompany or protect the Doctor from the monstrous entity that he associates strongly with death and ghosts. But a little later, she takes over the TARDIS, piloting it away and accidentally landing it in a barn containing a past form of the Doctor. It turns out that she is herself the monster, the ghostly presence that has changed and shaped the Doctor’s identity. Clara as the ghostly creature under the Doctor’s bed has a unique position: she is entwined with the Doctor’s timestream, but also stands apart from it with respect to her own timestream. Embodying a shadowy entity who exists largely in theory for the most part of the episode, that is supposed to be only a figment of the Doctor’s imagination, an embodiment of his fears, she is also a human being, alive and real. She is not there, since there is technically no monster under the bed, but she was actually there and grabbed the young Doctor by the ankle.

In  _Flatline_ , interestingly, Clara is not exactly locked out of the TARDIS, although she is prevented from re-entering it, but the Doctor is trapped inside it. Clara, for a large part of the episode, acts as an intermediary between the Doctor on one hand and Rigsy and the workmen on the other. She facilitates his communication with the world outside, serving as his eyes and ears, and implements his ideas. She literally acts as a safe-box here, stowing the shrunken TARDIS containing the Doctor inside her bag and carrying him around for a time. Clara saves him, and the TARDIS, from death. How does she do so? She arranges for a painting of a door, the simulation of a threshold, & tricks the Boneless into pouring their energy through it. In the first instance where she takes on directly the Doctor’s role, she does not just struggle to cross spaces & states. She constructs a new boundary, a dividing plane that actually does not exist, by putting the skills of another agent to use. This is, I think, the first time Clara dominates & creatively uses her liminality, instead of simply dancing around it.

In  _Death in Heaven_ , again there’s something interesting. Clara assumes a different identity, successfully confusing the Cybermen, except one. She loses consciousness, and wakes up in a graveyard. She fails to immediately recognise Danny in the Cyberman shell. Most importantly, she repairs and completes the transformation of Danny into a Cyberman. However, his core identity is not changed. She is the motivation for Danny guiding himself and the other Cybermen into a more final form of death, a fixed and less dangerous situation for them. Clara also intends to kill Missy, before the Doctor stops her. Clara mediates between life and death here, while occupying a liminal position herself between colliding lives and realities (her life on Earth/her life as a time traveller, her relationship with Danny/her relationship with the Doctor, Earth - represented by the UNIT/Missy and her Cybermen).

 _Last Christmas_  depicts Clara’s increasing dominance within as well as over her liminality more definitively than the rest of Series 8. For most of the episode, she is within a dream - dreams become synonymous with death in this episode. The goal is to wake up and rejoin life. It must also be remembered that at the end of  _Death in Heaven_ ,  Clara had already had a metaphorical death. It had been the death of her past self, as in, the lies, illusions, and the desperate need for control that jeopardizes her relationships, had all been sloughed off. The ending image of Clara walking back home, broken and hopeless, as the TARDIS vanished from sight, signifies precisely that. Clara chooses to remain on Earth as a human in order to liberate the Doctor, as she perceived it. But this decision to plant herself in a fixed space, denying her place in the liminal area, is akin to death, since metamorphosis is her way of building her identity. Clara actually walks to her grave, and thus, at the beginning of  _Last Christmas_ , Clara’s slow consumption and death by a Dream Crab. However, Clara manipulates the process of dreaming and waking up, dying and being reborn, twice. In both instances, she is aware of her condition. She is aware of the fact that Christmas with Danny Pink is a dream, and she deliberately prolongs the dream because she does not want her experience with the Doctor to be over yet. Her decision to stay longer in that state of limbo does not just affect her, it also pulls the Doctor in along with her. Although separated from life and progressing slowly towards, but still not having reached, death, suspended between harsh reality and her deepest fantasies, Clara controls her environment in order to enact a potential future. This last experience also does not remain limited to the dream, which the other participants such as Ashley and Bellows presumably forget, but it also changes reality for both her and the Doctor. She and the Doctor are reborn, with a new zest for time travel and each other’s company. Again, magic erupts from the liminal space between life and death.

If Series 7 was a study of Clara’s marginal status, Series 8 shows her becoming more aware of it and able to use it for her own desires, if not actually construct an identity based on it. She does not just attempt to breach limits, she also sets and defines new limits. She does this while not stepping into any fixed role: she tosses the sonic screwdriver to the Doctor for him to defeat the Boneless in  _Flatline_ , and she gives up the gadget to the Doctor again in  _Death in Heaven_ , stepping back from a position from where she can administer life and death, but which also threatens to solidify her status, perhaps sentence her to atrophy. She acts as an intermediary, a ghost in a state of transition, travelling within and guiding others, especially the Doctor, through the liminal state.


End file.
